


echoes in motel rooms, an echo in a cave

by salienne



Category: Swamp Thing (the tv show)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-02
Updated: 2010-09-02
Packaged: 2017-10-22 11:17:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salienne/pseuds/salienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the swamp, before (most of) Arcane's experiments, Alec Holland and Anton Arcane were coworkers, each struggling to create his own bio-restorative formula. They were also having an illicit affair. If you've seen the show, you know how this story ends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	echoes in motel rooms, an echo in a cave

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Happy birthday, [](http://wemblee.livejournal.com/profile)[**wemblee**](http://wemblee.livejournal.com/)!!! You are awesome, girlie! :D

Sometimes, she is awake when he leaves. Three AM, two—he hears her stir when he sits up, lays his arms on his legs, breathes in deeply, grips his knees with his hands. He walks to the closet and pulls out the first shirt, the first pants, that he finds.

Sometimes, she speaks. “Mm, Alec?”

She lies in bed on her stomach, hair rustling beneath the cool air from the ceiling fan. She reaches a sluggish arm across the warm and empty space where he has lain.

“It’s all right, Linda,” he says. “I just had a new idea about the formula. I’m afraid I need to work tonight.” He smiles, a wordless apology that, he realizes, she cannot see. “Go back to sleep, darling.”

“Now? It’s almost four AM.”

He shakes his head and walks over, buttoning his shirt. He kisses the top of her head. “I’ll get some rest during the day, promise. Get some sleep.”

Her head slumps against the pillow. Her shoulder blades stand out against the thin fabric of her nightgown and he has an urge to reach forward, to run his hand across her back until she turns to him, to bend down and press his lips against hers and have that be it, here and now, something beautiful and raw right here in his marriage bed.

He stands.

“You need any help?” she murmurs.

“Not now, in the morning. Go to sleep, darling.”

Her shoulders tense, then fall. “Be safe, Alec,” she says, only he can’t see her face to understand it, not in the dark, not with her turned away.

“Goodnight, Linda.”

The whir of the ceiling fan hides the patter of his bare feet across the carpet, fading quickly until only the cool air remains.

\---

The motel room is musty and hot. “About time,” Arcane snaps. He steps back from the door, allowing Alec to pass.

“Jesus, Arcane.” Just a few steps in and, already, Alec is tugging at his collar. “Don’t they have air conditioning in this place?”

“Yes, Holland, they do. Unfortunately, I can’t use my name and considerable prestige when anonymity is of the essence, now can I?”

Arcane wears a tight-fitting black t-shirt and only slightly looser black pants. He removes the shirt and tosses it onto a nearby armchair, one of two, and steps closer.

“You couldn’t bribe them?” Alec asks, only partially sarcastic.

“Why would I ever do something so unethical?” Another step, and Arcane reaches out and tugs on Alec’s collar, running the fabric between his fingers, his knuckles just barely grazing Alec’s skin. “Really, Holland. Just who do you take me for? Some spoiled cretin?”

Arcane shoves him hard onto the bed.

Before Alec can sit up, Arcane is straddling him. He mashes his lips against Alec’s, pushing the other man’s head, his body, deeper into the mattress. Alec can’t help it—he pulls Arcane closer. He wraps his arms around him. He shifts his leg and pushes it upward against Arcane’s groin.

Arcane’s body jerks. He lets out a hiss, and then he laughs. “You’ve been learning, haven’t you, Holland?”

“You’re a bastard, Arcane.”

Alec’s nails trail down Arcane’s bare back, tracing the curves of the muscles and spine until they reach the waistband of the pants that are still stubbornly, pointlessly, on.

“Oh my dear Alec.” Arcane grabs Alec’s forearms and shifts his weight onto them. His lips are at Alec’s ear and he takes a moment to bite, to make the other man gasp. “Don’t fancy yourself too kind.”

\--

They sit on opposite sides of another motel coffee table, a discard pile and a draw pile arranged around a mound of coins and bills. Alec throws down two cards, and Arcane tosses him two more. One falls to the floor, and Alec bends over to pick it up.

Arcane places another twenty-dollar bill onto the table. “I raise you forty.”

Organizing his cards, Alec glances over at the pile. “I would call,” he says, “only I don’t see forty more dollars in the pot.”

“Heavens me, you’re right! How ever did I miss something so obvious?” Arcane picks up his twenty from the middle of the table. “Proffering sixty dollars rather than forty—what a silly error. I do apologize.”

Alec just looks at him.

Throwing the twenty back down, Arcane rolls his eyes. “Oh relax, Holland. It was a joke.” He reaches down to pick his pants up off of the floor and takes another twenty from one of the pockets. His hand is at the jackpot, about to drop in the necessary funds, when, suddenly, he stops.

“How about,” Arcane says, “another wager?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Nothing of particular importance. Just… locations. Ideas. Formulas.”

“Arcane…”

“Yes?”

“We’ve spoken about this.”

“Have we?”

Alec breathes in deeply. He takes one of the twenties from the wallet at his feet and places it in the pile. “Locations.”

Arcane leans forward, hair slipping forward off of his shoulders and nearly brushing against the cards. It was styled once, gelled back, but they took care of that earlier. “Your personal lab, Dr. Holland. Or labs, I suppose. Where are they?”

“My lab? That’s common knowledge. It’s at the harbor.”

“And is that it?”

Alec opens his mouth, response ready, only to breathe out air instead of words. He sits up straighter, cards stacked together in his hand, close to his bare chest. “For this to be your wager, Doctor Arcane, shouldn’t you be offering your lab or labs rather than mine?”

“Ah, yes, of course. Excuse that, slip of the tongue.”

“Of course.”

Arcane lays out his cards, and so does Alec. A straight against a flush. Arcane’s scowl is almost adorable. Seconds pass, during which Alec can practically hear Arcane’s thought processes: to lie, or tell the truth; to lie and, if so, which lie?

Finally, Arcane says, “Beneath the swamp. I have a… a private facility where I can perform my research without interruption.”

“A cave, Dr. Arcane?”

“Perhaps.”

“A cave,” Alec repeats, close to laughing.

“Yes. What’s your point?”

“Oh, I just find it ironic, that’s all.”

“And why is that?”

“It’s just so… It’s a bit cliché, isn’t it? Performing experiments in a dark and dank hole in the ground?”

“Better than a rickety old boathouse, surely.”

Still amused, Alec says nothing, and with a long sigh, Arcane stands. “Well, Holland, collect your winnings. You’ve earned them.” He walks around the table and places his hands on Alec’s shoulders. He rubs his thumbs firmly against the tensed muscles. “Congratulations,” he says, close to Alec’s ear.

\---

Work the next day is difficult because Arcane, damn him, has left a mark. It is small but dark, red with spots of purple, located at the border of his collar along the side of his neck. Logically he knows that others will assume the spot came from his wife. At most, he will be seen as unprofessional, perhaps a bit vulgar. Impressive even.

But as he leans over his desk, tipping a vial of hydrochloric acid into a small flask or taking notes on carbon paper, he can’t help but run his fingers along the collar’s rim.

He remembers teeth and pressure. Nails digging into flesh and his hips jerking up off the mattress and not giving a damn, not giving a damn about anything except Arcane and how he wanted him to stay _right there_ or go lower, go fucking lower, damn stop don’t leave, not ever, don’t stop.

Alec catches himself smiling far less than he catches himself gripping a pencil so hard that it snaps.

\---

That evening, he misses dinner. He meets Arcane in another motel room, this one with fully functioning amenities, and if he were a different sort of man he would punch the smug son of a bitch in the face.

“Really, Holland, it’s such a small mark.”

Arcane lies on his back on the bed, fully clothed, a single knee raised. He waves his hand through the air as if to say, tiny and insignificant really, can’t we just discuss the fascinating pattern of dots on this ceiling?

“A mark my wife could see, Arcane,” Alec snaps. “My wife. And if my wife finds out, you can be damned sure your girlfriend will too. Or should I say girlfriends?”

Again, Arcane waves the comments away. “Go home and fuck her. Unless your sex life is monumentally boring, she’ll think that mark was of her own skilled doing. Is she skilled, your wife? Do share.”

“She’s not some disposable sex object! Damn it, Arcane.”

Alec knocks a hand against his thigh, pacing back and forth, back and forth. It’s just past midnight and Linda should be getting into bed now. No, he realizes, she’s probably already asleep. Linda has never liked being home alone in the evenings. She once said it reminded her of how small she was in the universe, how enormous the cosmos and how insignificant their lives were in the grand scheme of it all.

She was wrong, he told her. She was beautiful, brilliant, important and amazing. Just look at the work she was doing now, with him. How could she ever, ever, consider herself insignificant?

She wouldn’t say no.

Arcane is laughing. “Admit it. You want to stay, Holland.”

“What I want is for you to abide by the terms of our agreement.”

“Agreement? What agreement?” Arcane sits up. “Come now, Holland. I have Tatania. I do know what it’s like.”

“Unfortunately, you lack my moral compass or any moral fiber to speak of.”

“Really now?” Arcane stands. “You know, Holland,” and he walks closer, “perhaps the difference between you and I is simply that I am willing to confront the reality of my situation.”

Alec scoffs. “What about me then, Arcane? What am I doing?”

“At the moment, my dear Alec, you’re about to do what you must.”

\---

Alec returns home. He runs his hand through Linda’s hair and kisses the crown of her head. Linda turns to him, and that is all he needs.

\---

A month and a half later, Arcane is engaged.

\---

They lie on twisted motel sheets, the thin and awkwardly fuzzy tan blanket somewhere on the floor. The room is dark and the air stale, every curtain and door shut tight, as the sound of Alec’s soft and steady breathing fills the rooms. Arcane sits with his back against the headboard, running his fingers through the other man’s hair.

“She’s beautiful, you know,” he says. “My Tatania. She has the most outstanding legs. The way they wrap around one’s calf or behind one’s neck—magnificent, really. And her breasts, Holland! Her breasts. Never has man come in contact with a more delightful pair. The perfect handhold.” He lifts his free hand, cupping it. “She is truly spectacular.”

Arcane rests his head back against the wood, his breath once more mingling with Alec’s.

“Our wives are quite similar, don’t you think, Holland?” he continues. “Beautiful, blond, an exquisite tongue—I only assume, of course. You would never talk about that, would you? Perhaps I should… no, no, even you wouldn’t forgive that. Perhaps at my wedding. Perhaps we’ll speak then, your delightful Linda and I.”

His hand stills on Alec’s forehead.

“I don’t know why I keep doing this, you know. It’s not you. No, my Crown Prince has a much more sculpted body, and even that idiot Graham has a better cock. Really, Holland, the things you’re unwilling to try… Surely you know that repression died out with De Sade.”

He moves his hand again, just once, a simple tender stroke through Alec’s hair.

“It’s difficult not to respect you, I suppose. Your talent. Your intellect. Nothing approaching mine, of course, but… There is so much you could do with that, Holland. Alec. So many places you could go.”

Arcane allows himself to slide down, to slip under the covers they share and turn onto his side to look at the man beside him.

“And to think,” Arcane murmurs, “you’re willing to risk all that for me.”

Alec’s fingers brush against his, just barely, and then both men are still.

\---

The wedding between Tatania Demidova and Anton Arcane is as loud, large, and extravagant as one would expect. The local bishop drives in, and before the ceremony, he has a lovely private supper with the local scientist and the richest Southern belle in the region. The wedding itself is held in the only ballroom in Houma, with glistening chandeliers and enough room to seat two towns its size. A set of embroidered silk screens divide the space into a makeshift church and a dining hall, and, surrounded by stained glass that has been backlit by lamps, Tatania walks down the aisle. The wedding march is loud, the family murmurings tear-filled and appreciative, until the moment when she reaches the rose archway where Arcane waits and everything stops.

The bishop begins to speak.

In the far corner of the benches, Alec and Linda sit. The air is strange back there, a mixture of flowers and roast pork, and Alec finds himself focusing on that smell. Almost nauseated by that smell. He grits his teeth and keeps his hands in his pockets, as still as he can.

Linda leans over to whisper into her husband’s ear. “They look happy,” she says.

Looking into his fiancé’s eyes, absolutely beaming, Arcane says, “I do.”

\---

This time, it takes just two weeks. A file left on Alec’s desk on a Friday, empty but for the name of a rare plant he pointed out to Arcane once at the entrance to a hotel four counties away—a weekend trip. Looking at the poor print-out of the three-leafed plant, Alec almost bursts out laughing. It’s the first weekend since Tatania and Anton Arcane’s honeymoon.

This time, he chooses another location.

\---

Linda is out of town visiting her mother, and inside Alec and Linda’s bed, one of the men gasps. He clenches the sheets. He pulls at them.

“God.” His hips jerk up. He can barely breathe. “Oh fuck, please. You miserable bastard. Please.”

With a smirk, Alec moves his mouth more quickly down the head of Arcane’s cock, his other hand tightening around the base. Across Arcane’s hip, the bite marks are deep, and red.

“Oh God. God…”

Alec stops. He sits up. “Turn over.”

Arcane obeys.

That night, Alec makes him bleed.

\---

Every Monday morning sometime between seven and noon, the Houma Weekly is delivered to Alec and Linda’s stoop with a hollow thump against the front door. Alec is sitting at the dining room table, sipping his coffee and watching the soft rustle of the leaves outside the window, as Linda brings it inside.

“Oh no.”

“Linda?”

“Have you seen this, Alec?”

“What?”

She hands over the paper and points to a side-article on the front page.

“Alec?”

He stands and, without even looking at her, makes his way to the front door. “I’ve got to go.”

He gets in the car. The sun has barely risen in the sky. He drives.

\---

Beneath the military complex are a series of enormous storage cellars and half-finished tunnels, a cobweb path of dust and dead ends. The light is thin, the air thick with heat, and just around every corner is a potential dead end. Alec loses track of the number of times he comes to a wall of dirt or simply too many crates to get around, and with every retraced step he hopes he’s not missing something. Hopes Arcane isn’t _that_ clever.

Once, there is something Alec very much hopes was a raccoon.

He steps on shards of glass and rat droppings. He walks.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to figure out how to locate Arcane’s private lab. Somewhere in this direction, east of the facility, is the swamp, and as the air becomes cooler, as he begins to taste the moss and minerals with each breath, he knows he is moving in the right direction. Then there is the conversation he overheard at Arcane’s wedding, when the balding and very drunk lab assistant was complaining about the trek through the cellars—the glass, the cockroaches that loved people, the crates that started splintering as they got closer to their destination, that creepy oxidized bust of Einstein by _the_ tunnel.

It wasn’t much, but it told him enough.

He still gets lost.

Over an hour after first taking the flaking cement stairs down to basement level, Alec is hot, sweaty, and cursing with every other thought, sometimes out loud. He mentally retraces every step he can remember—maybe it was a left at the rusted pile of old scales, maybe he could have squeezed past that crate with the bicycle on top of it. When he comes to the statue, he almost doesn’t believe it. Still squinting beneath the faded bulb lights, he actually has to point his pocket flashlight directly at it, mentally tracing every chip and curve.

Just as the assistant said, it’s Einstein’s head, with wild green hair and a worn green face. As Alec moves, its deep-set eyes seem to follow him.

There is only one tunnel in the area. The path twists so quickly to the left that any casual observer would assume it to be just another unfinished passageway, but now that he is here, pace quickening, ground sloping upward, he knows better. He knows enough not to worry when the air begins to smell of iodine, rather than earth. To keep his flashlight out and keep walking as the tunnel darkens, and to put it back in his pocket when he sees the yellow-tinted light at the end of the corridor.

Alec takes a deep breath, and he shuts his eyes for a moment as he passes the lamp at eye-level, and he enters Arcane’s lab.

The cave is smaller and cleaner than he was expecting, though just as cluttered and just as poorly lit. Patches of yellowed light from large industrial bulbs dot the room, gleaming across tables and tools; the rest is coated in a sickly green light that creates shadows where they shouldn’t be, lending an alien, even skeletal, feel to the place.

In the middle of the lab, Arcane stands over a man who might be dead.

The man lies on a metallic table, a makeshift gurney, with pale blue hospital paper lying across his abnormally thin abdomen and chest. Arcane has a scalpel in his hand. Upon hearing Alec’s entrance, he pulls down his mask with a gloved hand, splattered with red. “Holland? What the hell are you doing here?”

Behind Arcane is a wide hollow in the wall, and there a man with scaly gray-green skin stands hunched over, held up only by the manacles at his wrists. Alec can’t see his face, but the hairless scalp is scabbed and raw.

“Holland?”

“What is this?” Alec manages. “What the hell is going on here?” He runs down the makeshift stairs that come down from the entrance, ready to shove Arcane back from the table, to get these men out of here.

He stops.

There’s blood on that pale blue paper. The wound… how large is the wound?

Arcane glances down. “What, him? Oh relax, I’ve barely started.”

“Arcane, _what is this_?”

Arcane crosses his arms, and that is when Alec realizes something.

“My God. What have you done to your wife?”

The next thing Alec knows, Arcane has shoved him back against one of the cave walls, a rattled table digging into his thighs, scissors and shards of glass scattering around them. Arcane’s hands are at his lapels and the scalpel, where the hell is the scalpel? Alec grabs Arcane’s wrists, eyes darting, breath catching—there, on the floor. Far away from his throat.

He tries to push Arcane off, really _tries_ , and then Arcane cries out and shoves him back once more.

“What did I do?” Arcane demands. His breath reeks of stale alcohol. “What did I… What did _I_ do?”

He barks out a laugh and then suddenly, so suddenly Alec doesn’t even realize he can let go now, pulls back. Manic, he begins to pace.

“Oh no, Holland,” Arcane says. “For once I was blameless, for once I was careful, for once I was doing what was right!” Arcane runs gloved fingers through his hair, pulling at matted clumps as if trying to separate them from him, separate himself from himself. “How many times did I ask you for your version of the formula, Holland? Ten? Twenty? Just a hint, I told you. All I needed was a hint. We could have been partners, you and I! We could have been renowned, celebrated throughout the scientific community, the world! We could have…”

Arcane swallows.

“God damn you, we could have saved her.”

Alec looks up, his fingers on the neck of the man on the table—a steady pulse, slow but that’s to be expected from an unconscious man, probably under heavy anesthesia. Arcane wasn’t lying; the cut is small, less than a centimeter long along the edge of his right pectoralis major, not particularly deep and already beginning to clot. Blood has spread across the man’s skin in rivers and rivulets, staining the blue sheet and spreading out through the fibers so that the wound appears much worse than it is.

“What is it, Alec? Now the body’s lying in front of you, your precious morality suddenly cares? Is this what it bloody takes?”

Arcane shakes the table so hard it rattles.

“Arcane! St-”

The body jerks as Arcane shakes the table again, and again. Alec tries to hold him down, to grab Arcane’s arms or to put pressure on the unconscious man’s shoulders, but either Arcane is too strong or his efforts too unfocused. Arcane shoves the body off. Alec jumps back, then sticks his arms out but too late. The body lands heavily on the ground.

Kneeling down, Alec rolls the man onto his back. Although dirt and blood are now smeared across his bare chest, his wound somehow remains clean.

“Typical,” Arcane sneers. “Just one of many bodies at your feet, isn’t it, Holland?”

“Arcane, what the hell is this? What are you talking about?”

“Oh you can’t be that mentally deficient, can you? The genius Alec Holland. The man who created a biorestorative formula.”

Slowly, Alec stands. “Your wife.”

“My wife.”

“What happened, Arcane?”

“What do you think happened?” Arcane snaps. “The biorestorative formula, I created my own prototype and then perfected it—with no help from you, I might add. Animal trials progressed at an astounding rate, but as both you and I know, it’s impossible to know the effectiveness of a human-based formula until you test it on a human subject.”

“Your own wife, Arcane?”

“Of course I did-”

“Is that what this is?” Alec continues, gesturing at the lab, the men. “Your human trials? But there was something wrong, wasn’t there? Or maybe things were going so perfectly that you decided to use it, only you were too much of a coward to try the final product on yourself. So you decided to take advantage of the one person you knew you could manipulate. Someone who loved you, someone who-”

“Holland-” and his voice is louder now, but Alec doesn’t notice.

“-would believe anything you told her. What’d you do, Arcane, tell her it was the secret to everlasting youth? Did you tell her it was safe? Did you hold her and promise her you would love her _forever_ this way? Did you tell her you were a _scientist_?”

“Holland!”

Arcane’s voice reverberates through the cave, or perhaps it only seems to, perhaps the sound only feels like a thickening of the air as Alec’s words echo through their minds, clinging to crevices and snagging to synaptic pathways.

Nothing stands between them now, and Alec’s chest is heaving, and they can practically touch and yet neither man moves.

“As fascinating as your self-loathing diatribe is,” Arcane manages, words pressed and molded into an obviously strained calmness, “we don’t have time for it right now. I’ve never seen these men before last week, and as should be obvious to you of all people, I did not poison my own wife.” Arcane looks down, fingers rubbing at his forehead. “Oh, but you are right on one count, Holland, and doesn’t that bring you joy? I was too much of a coward to take the formula. It was for me, I was going to brave the danger, me, only I couldn’t. Too much of a coward to taste my own work and too much of a damned fool to remain quiet. It’s almost poetic, isn’t it?

“No, my Tatania, she… Tatania,” and his voice actually breaks on her name, “she took it while I was asleep, without my knowledge.” Arcane breathes in heavily, and when he looks up, Alec is stunned to see a shimmering, a redness, to those eyes. “I woke up to the sound of her screams.”

Alec’s voice is quiet. “I’m sorry.” And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, he means it. He believes Anton Arcane.

“All the good that is now.”

Once again Arcane crosses his arms but now the gesture seems almost passive, self-directed. His breathing is harsh but as the seconds pass, his heaving shoulders seem to still. He moves forward and places his hands on Alec’s shoulders. “Alec, listen to me. I-”

“I can’t.”

Arcane’s fingers tighten, almost painfully. “What does that mean, you can’t?”

Alec is silent.

“Don’t be absurd, Holland. You know the truth now. You have to help me. I need the formula to save Tatania’s life. The hospital was barely able to resuscitate her and who knows how long that will last? That’s all this is,” he says, motioning to the area around them, “my attempt at bringing her back to me.”

Alec does not move, he can’t move, as Arcane presses his forehead to his. “Alec, please,” Arcane whispers. “I need her.”

And though the words are so familiar Alec can almost hear them in his own voice, reverberating through his own throat, he pulls away.

“What about these men, Arcane?” Alec says. “What about them?”

“What, the drunk and the homeless? Insignificant. What matters is Tatania.”

Perhaps he sees something in Alec’s face then, or perhaps he realizes that what he has said is not enough, not for someone unwilling to weigh life on an ever-changing scale, because he continues, “Alec, listen to me. I needed these men to refine the drug. I chose them specifically because no one would miss them, including themselves. This research can only help the poor sods—you should have seen them, Alec, unconscious in gutters. I certainly can’t make their lives any worse.” Voice lower, he says, “You wouldn’t help me, Alec. I asked and you wouldn’t, and this is the only way-”

“-This isn’t the way, Arcane, this is _never_ -”

“You wouldn’t give me the damn formula!” He moves closer again, circling, repositioning, until Alec is once again against the table and Arcane is, once again, so very close.

“Please,” he says. “Anything you want, I’ll do it. I’ll confess my crimes here, I’ll retire from the field, I’ll destroy my notes. My fortune, Tatania’s fortune, you can have it all. I will give you everything. Anything.”

His fingers brush against Alec’s, then tighten around the other man’s hand and Alec wants to believe him, he does, but these men and this lab and Arcane’s hand, tight around his, and Alec can barely breathe around the ghost of fingers at his throat.

“Please,” Arcane is saying, “as a decent man who knows what it is to love, please help her.”

Alec whispers, “You can’t even see the extent of your own madness, Anton.”

The disgust in Arcane’s recoil is impossible to miss. “Madness or not, what does it matter? This isn’t for me, it’s for Tatania! You can inject her with the formula yourself if you trust me so bloody little. But don’t let her die because of me!”

But Arcane would test her and both men know it, even if Arcane has talked himself out of the truth. He would find and refine and reproduce the formula, and looking at these two men—the scaly one behind him, the bleeding one on the floor—Alec is terrified of just what Arcane would do when his gratitude became lost in a sea of new ideas and the touch of his living, perpetually youthful, wife.

“I’m sorry, Anton,” Alec says, and to utter the words is almost as painful as the conviction he now shackles himself with, but it is the right thing.

“Alec-”

“I’m sorry, but you’ve gone too far.”

And even though Alec can see himself standing beside the other man now, fighting for him, for his wife, he grips the table and forces himself to look Arcane in the eyes. “Maybe I could have helped you once, but I can’t anymore. Not now.”

As he picks up the man on the floor and looks back at the man in the manacles, Arcane does not say a word.

Alec says, “I’ll be back for him.”

“If you step foot in here again, Dr. Holland,” Arcane replies, “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill both of you.”

At the bottom of the steps, Alec stops. He turns, telling himself he misheard but knowing he hasn’t, knowing that somehow something has twisted inside Arcane that perhaps has always been broken, but is now unreachable. He looks at Arcane and at the flasks along the walls and thinks, if only I could help him. If only I could.

He nods.

And because it is the right thing, Alec Holland leaves the lab.

\---

Two nights later, Linda Holland dies, and the Alec Holland who might have been, who decided not to be, is gone.


End file.
